Watch: Tourists defy death at Manali-Chandigarh highway

Last Updated: Monday, December 7, 2015 – 15:50

Zee Media Bureau

New Delhi: Several tourists on had a narrow escape when a part of a mountain near Chandigarh-Manali highway collapsed. The 31-second video, recorded by a mobile phone camera, shows tourists running for their lives.

Initially, it was said that the landslide was caused due to an earthquake today in the region, but later it was clarified that the incident has no connection with the earthquake.

Earthquakes in the Eastern Mediterranean? Much More Plentiful in Past Than Thought

A recent study found that the historical occurrence of earthquakes in the eastern Mediterranean Sea has been much more plentiful than previously thought. They have suggestions for precautions to take, considering that. (Photo : Wikimedia Commons)

There is more seismic activity in the eastern Mediterranean than was previously thought, and a study about this was recently accepted for publication in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Historically in the long stretch of geological time, seismic activity near and around Crete has stirred up bursts of earthquakes, and this may increase the region’s future risk of earthquakes and tsunamis, according to a release.

Several tectonic plates are in the Mediterranean basin, caused by the African and Eurasian Plates crashing together there. While scientists have been aware that the collision between the two plates can make the eastern part of that sea and land area susceptible to earthquakes, they’ve also been confused by the region having gone through only two (known) earthquakes larger than 8 on the Richter scale in 4,000 years.

The African Plate goes under the Aegean microplate just south of Crete. This occurs in an area shaped like an arc, which is called the Hellenic margin. The scientists in the study looked at the history of earthquakes in this subduction zone, to learn what could drive mega-earthquakes in the area.

“We study the Hellenic subduction margin going back to about 50,000 years, which is about 10 times the time window of paleo-earthquake observations in the eastern Mediterranean that we had before,” Vasiliki Mouslopoulou, at the GFZ German Research Center for Geosciences, and study lead author, in the release. “For the first time ever, we were able to chart the spatial and temporal pattern with which mega-earthquakes rupture the Hellenic margin.”

At UN Summit, Obama Blames America for Global Warming

Speaking at a United Nations “climate” summit in Paris, Obama blamed America for alleged man-made global warming and claimed that the nation embraces its responsibility to “do something” about the alleged problem. That “something,” of course, at least in the administration’s view, involves redistributing the wealth of embattled U.S. taxpayers to Third World governments and dictatorships for climate reparations, as well as shackling the American economy with draconian controls to reduce emissions of what serious scientists know as the “gas of life.” Sounding like a wannabe messiah, Obama even claimed that “we finally determined we would save our planet.” However, lawmakers in Congress and the American people have made clear that they neither believe in the increasingly discredited anthropogenic global-warming (AGW) theory nor in the alleged solutions to the supposed problem.

Dictators and other heads of state have typically arrived at UN conferences toward the end of the show. This time, however, hoping desperately to secure a global “climate” agreement where past summits have failed, UN organizers decided Obama and other “world leaders” should show up at the start. Obama complied, spewing gargantuan amounts of CO2 and arriving in Paris to deliver various speeches hyping the AGW theory, along with illegal pledges to hand out your money. “I’ve come here personally, as the leader of the world’s largest economy and the second-largest emitter, to say that the United States of America not only recognizes our role in creating this problem, we embrace our responsibility to do something about it,” Obama claimed at the ongoing conference, which featured some 150 dictators and heads of government and state.

Of course, Obama is not the “leader” of the “world’s largest economy.” His job description is to serve as the chief executive of the federal government, to faithfully execute the laws, and to uphold and defend the Constitution. His other claims were even more ludicrous. For instance, the notion that America recognizes its alleged role in creating the alleged problem could not be more wrong. According to a Pew survey released last year, just 40 percent of Americans even believe the increasingly discredited AGW theory. And without a doubt, far less than that would agree that the nation should shackle its economy and redistribute its wealth to Third World regimes under the guise of dealing with a problem that the overwhelming majority of Americans do not even believe exists.

Obama blames America for non-existent global warming

September 24, 2014 6:52 AM MST

Barack Obama speaks at U.N. climate summit.

Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

While speaking at the United Nations on Tuesday, President Obama blamed the United States for global warming, even though there has been no global warming for nearly 18 years. While the administration insists global warming is a real threat, one professor issued a paper saying there has been no global warming for 19 years.

“But there should be no question that the United States of America is stepping up to the plate,” Obama said. “We recognize our role in creating this problem; we embrace our responsibility to combat it. We will do our part, and we will help developing nations do theirs. But we can only succeed in combating climate change if we are joined in this effort by every nation –- developed and developing alike. Nobody gets a pass.”

Obama hyped action the United States has taken, touting moves taken against power companies in what has been described as a “war on coal.” According to the president, the United States has reduced its total “carbon pollution” by more than any other nation.

Breaking news and analysis from the world of science policy

Carolyn is a staff writer for Science and is the editor of the In Brief section.

……….

It’s getting hot in here. A dispute between the chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) over a climate change paper published this summer is escalating. The latest salvos include a second letter from Representative Lamar Smith (R–TX) to NOAA Administrator Kathryn Sullivan seeking internal communications and documents authored by NOAA employees and a letter from the American Meteorological Society condemning Smith’s demands and warning about its implications for all federally funded research.

The quarrel began with a paper by NOAA scientists published 5 June in Science that revised historical atmosphere and ocean temperature data records found to have been poorly calibrated. In 2013 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had noted that the temperature data seemed to suggest that global warming had slowed down beginning around 1998. But the Science paper showed that apparent slowdown in global warming vanished when the data were corrected to account for various sources of bias.

That paper immediately caught Smith’s attention, triggering multiple committee requests for data and methodologies related to the study. NOAA told the committee that the findings were already publicly available and met twice with committee staff to brief them on the results.

But that response didn’t satisfy Smith. On 13 October, he subpoenaed all of NOAA’s internal emails related to the paper, asking for the information by 27 October. In response, the committee’s Democrats wrote to Smith on 23 October, noting that the subpoena “appears to be furthering a fishing expedition” and saying that it oversteps the committee’s bounds, as the paper is a research study and not a policy decision. House Republican leadership this year had given Smith the authority to issue subpoenas without the consent of the minority party.

Did Federal Agency Commit Climate Fraud? Sure Looks Like It

10/28/2015 06:30 PM ET

Junk Science: Worried about climate fraud, Congress is investigating a federal agency for allegedly manipulating weather data to show recent global warming when there is none. So why is the agency refusing to cooperate?

First, a little background: Satellite temperature readings clearly show no warming trend for the last 18 years, 8 months and counting. None.

This fact is significant for two reasons: One, satellite temperature readings are the most comprehensive and thus the most accurate. And, two, the pause in warming since 1998 undercuts the entire global warming agenda of the environmental movement and its allies on the left who see in climate change an opportunity to impose greater government control over our lives.

Yes, we’re skeptical of “climate change,” at least as defined by the green extremists. Climate is always changing. No one denies that. What’s at issue is how it’s changing and why. The science is still unclear.

Earlier this year, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) scientists took part in a study that found — no surprise — that the “pause” in global warming from 1998 to 2013 didn’t exist.

Their change didn’t come from actual temperature readings. It came from extensive data manipulation and tinkering. Instead of a pause, they found a surge.

ANTARCTIC temperatures have cooled over the past six years, according to US space agency NASA.

An intensive scientific study of both Earth’s poles has found that from 2009 to 2016 overall temperature has dropped in the southern polar region.NASA’s Operation IceBridge is an airborne survey of polar ice and has finalised two overlapping research campaigns at both the poles.In the last few weeks NASA has revealed the overall amount of ice has increased at the Antarctic and the amount of sea ice has also extended.Coupled with the latest announcement of slight cooling in the area, it has fuelled claims from climate change deniers that human industrialisation is not having the huge impact on global tenperature as often is claimed.

New paper claims no pause in warming, but unaltered data says otherwise

Environmental activists have plundered Nature’s Scientific Reports and released a paper yesterday that they claim removes all doubt there is a global warming pause. After examining 40 peer-reviewed papers that show a global warming hiatus, they claim the papers didn’t examine a long enough period of time. In fact, the authors—Stephan Lewandowsky, James Risbey, and Naomi Oreskes—broke the golden rule of science: they started with a predetermined outcome and then cherry-picked the data to fit their conclusion. It also runs counter to the unaltered datasets from leading climate institutions.

The paper assessed the “magnitude and significance of all possible trends up to 25 years duration looking backwards from each year over the past 30 years.” Unsurprisingly, the authors thought the papers didn’t use a long enough time frame to show a clear global warming pause over the entire global warming “record.” Here we document how this extended global warming record has been tampered, altered, and utilized for politicized “green ideology,” and how massive alterations were made to both NASA and NOAA’s temperature data series.

According to the satellite record (the most accurate), weather balloons, radiosonde data, sea surface temperatures, and weather stations (least accurate), previously unadulterated data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Goddard Institute of Space Studies (NASA GISS) data showed a long-term definitive trend: no increase in tropospheric temperatures when the Industrial Revolution began in earnest after World War II.

We do have weather station temperature data, albeit spotty, that goes back to 1881 and it shows regular intervals of warming and cooling, and not the popular upward slope in temperatures used by environmentalists and governments to illustrate dramatic global warming. More on that shortly.

Earth is Cooling…No It’s Warming

In 1967 Hansen went to work for NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, in New York City, where he continued his research on planetary problems. Around 1970, some scientists suspected Earth was entering a period of global cooling. Decades prior, the brilliant Serbian mathematician Milutin Milankovitch had explained how our world warms and cools on roughly 100,000-year cycles due to its slowly changing position relative to the Sun. Milankovitch’s theory suggested Earth should be just beginning to head into its next ice age cycle. The surface temperature data gathered by Mitchell seemed to agree; the record showed that Earth experienced a period of cooling (by about 0.3°C) from 1940 through 1970. Of course, Mitchell was only collecting data over a fraction of the Northern Hemisphere—from 20 to 90 degrees North latitude. Still, the result drew public attention and a number of speculative articles about Earth’s coming ice age appeared in newspapers and magazines.

Initial efforts to observe Earth’s temperature were limited to the Northern Hemisphere, and they showed a cooling trend from 1940 to 1970 (jagged line). Scientists estimated the relative effects of carbon dioxide (warming, top curve) and aerosols (cooling, bottom curve) on climate, but did not have enough data to make precise predictions. (Graph from Mitchell, 1972.)

But other scientists forecasted global warming. Russian climatologist Mikhail Budyko had also observed the three-decade cooling trend. Nevertheless, he published a paper in 1967 in which he predicted the cooling would soon switch to warming due to rising human emissions of carbon dioxide. Budyko’s paper and another paper published in 1975 by Veerabhadran Ramanathan caught Hansen’s attention. Ramanathan pointed out that human-made chlorofluorocarbons (or CFCs) are particularly potent greenhouse gases, with as much as 200 times the heat-retaining capacity of carbon dioxide. Because people were adding CFCs to the lower atmosphere at an increasing rate, Ramanathan expressed concern that these new gases would eventually add to Earth’s greenhouse effect and cause our world to warm. (Because CFCs also erode Earth’s protective ozone layer, their use was mostly abolished in 1989 with the signing of the Montreal Protocol.)

The Earth’s climate has changed throughout history. Just in the last 650,000 years there have been seven cycles of glacial advance and retreat, with the abrupt end of the last ice age about 7,000 years ago marking the beginning of the modern climate era — and of human civilization. Most of these climate changes are attributed to very small variations in Earth’s orbit that change the amount of solar energy our planet receives.

Scientific evidence for warming of the climate system is unequivocal.

– Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

The current warming trend is of particular significance because most of it is very likely human-induced and proceeding at a rate that is unprecedented in the past 1,300 years.1

Earth-orbiting satellites and other technological advances have enabled scientists to see the big picture, collecting many different types of information about our planet and its climate on a global scale. This body of data, collected over many years, reveals the signals of a changing climate.

Sea level rise

Global temperature rise

All three major global surface temperature reconstructions show that Earth has warmed since 1880.5 Most of this warming has occurred since the 1970s, with the 20 warmest years having occurred since 1981 and with all 10 of the warmest years occurring in the past 12 years.6 Even though the 2000s witnessed a solar output decline resulting in an unusually deep solar minimum in 2007-2009, surface temperatures continue to increase.7

Shrinking ice sheets

The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets have decreased in mass. Data from NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment show Greenland lost 150 to 250 cubic kilometers (36 to 60 cubic miles) of ice per year between 2002 and 2006, while Antarctica lost about 152 cubic kilometers (36 cubic miles) of ice between 2002 and 2005.

GENEVA – Weather-related disasters such as floods and heatwaves have occurred almost daily in the past decade, almost twice as often as two decades ago, with Asia being the hardest hit region, a UN report said on Monday.

While the report authors could not pin the increase wholly on climate change, they did say that the upward trend was likely to continue as extreme weather events increased.

Since 1995, weather disasters have killed millions of people, left billions injured, homeless or in need of aid, and accounted for 90 percent of all disasters, it said.

A recent peak year was 2002, when drought in India hit 200 million and a sandstorm in China affected 100 million.

But the standout mega-disaster was Cyclone Nargis, which killed 138,000 in Myanmar in 2008.

There have been more than 11,000 fires in just one region of the Brazilian Amazon this year

While climate change can certainly exacerbate drought conditions, leading to more frequent wildfires, this year’s ferocious fire season might also have been heavily influenced by the El Niño event developing in the Pacific Ocean.

Satellite images revealed that on October 4, 2015 there were over 900 fires burning in the Brazilian Amazon at once.

The region most affected by the fires was the northern state of Amazonas, where some 11,114 forest fires were recorded this year.

If the Pacific El Niño continues to strengthen, researchers expect fire risk in the Amazon to increase, as well.

On October 4, 2015, satellite images revealed that there were over 900 fires burning in the Brazilian Amazon.That figure was reported by Brazil’s Institute for Space Research, known as INPE, which said that the region most affected by the fires was the northern state of Amazonas. Some 11,114 forest fires have already been observed in Amazonas this year, a 47 percent increase over the same period last year, according to INPE.

Amazonas is not alone in dealing with increased incidence of forest fires. More than a quarter of the fires so far this year have occurred in the Cerrado agricultural region, which encompasses parts of the central states of Mato Grosso, Mato Grosso do Sul, Tocantins and Minas Gerais, for instance.

Meanwhile, Brazil’s southeastern states have been suffering from extreme drought, and a study by researchers at the Carnegie Institution for Science at Stanford University determined that the area of the Amazon affected by mild to severe drought is likely to double in the eastern part of Amazonia and triple in the west by 2100, due largely to the impacts of deforestation.

The Carnegie Institution researchers did not factor rising global temperatures into their calculations, however, meaning drought conditions are likely to be even worse than they projected. That does not bode well for future fire seasons being tamer than 2015.

Indonesian workers load rice on a truck at Tanjung Priok Port in Jakarta, Indonesia, on 14 November. Indonesia will import about 1.5m tonnes of rice from Vietnam due to the impact of El Niño. Photograph: Bagus Indahono/EPA

The UN has warned of months of extreme weather in many of the world’s most vulnerable countries with intense storms, droughts and floods triggered by one of the strongest El Niño weather events recorded in 50 years, which is expected to continue until spring 2016.

El Niño is a natural climatic phenomenon that sees equatorial waters in the eastern Pacific ocean warm every few years. This disrupts regular weather patterns such as monsoons and trade winds, and increases the risk of food shortages, floods, disease and forest fires.

This year, a strong El Niño has been building since March and its effects are already being seen in Ethiopia, Somalia, Kenya, Malawi, Indonesia and across Central America, according to the World Meteorological Organisation. The phenomenon is also being held responsible for uncontrolled fires in forests in Indonesia and in the Amazon rainforest.

The UN’s World Meteorological Organization warned in a report on Monday that the current strong El Niño is expected to strengthen further and peak around the end of the 2015. “Severe droughts and devastating flooding being experienced throughout the tropics and sub-tropical zones bear the hallmarks of this El Niño, which is the strongest in more than 15 years,” said WMO secretary-general Michel Jarraud.

Jarraud said the impact of the naturally occurring El Niño event was being exacerbated by global warming, which had already led to record temperatures this year. “This event is playing out in uncharted territory. Our planet has altered dramatically because of climate change,” he said. “So this El Niño event and human-induced climate change may interact and modify each other in ways which we have never before experienced. El Niño is turning up the heat even further.”

This year’s El Niño is shaping up to be one of the most powerful on record

If you’ve been paying attention to the weather news at all lately, you’ll know that it’s a big year for a weather event called El Niño.

The complex phenomenon could bring warmer, wetter weather to the Northeast this winter and much-needed rain to California, but worsen cold and drought conditions elsewhere in the US.

And this year’s El Niño could be one of the most powerful on record, experts say.

“One of the strongest El Niño events in the past 65 years is likely to bring significant winter weather to the United States,” James Aman, senior meteorologist at Earth Networks, said in a statement.

What the heck is El Niño, anyway?

El Niño is a weather event characterized by warmer-than-normal temperatures in the equatorial Pacific Ocean, with important consequences for global weather and climate, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. By contrast, La Niña refers to colder-than-normal Pacific temperatures.

The effects of El Niño can be seen across the globe, from increased rainfall in the Southern US and Peru to drought in the Western Pacific and brush fires in Australia.

“It’s a complex scenario,” says John Long from Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia. He says there are probably a lot of causes conspiring to drive these mass extinctions. But his latest work suggests fluctuations in essential minerals in the ocean could be an important, and so-far completely unexplored, cause.

Essential selenium

Earlier this year, researchers discovered that periods when the ocean had high levels of trace elements – like zinc, copper, manganese and selenium – seemed to overlap with periods of high productivity, including the Cambrian explosion, when most groups of living animals first appeared.

Global warming may be responsible for AMOC’s slowdown but natural forces may also be at work, NASA said. AMOC is part of the complex circulation of currents that help take the warmer Gulf Stream water and move it through the basin.

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